Content isn’t king, it’s a game of thrones
Ever since Bill Gates coined the term ‘content is king’ way back in 1996, marketers have been using it as a catch-all excuse to publish reams of content that nobody watches. As Atomic 212°’s head of content Kellie Holt explains, content isn’t a monarchy.
Remember when we used to read stories in magazines, watch shows on the TV and listen to music on our iPods or the radio? These days, we’ve now rolled all that – and much more – up under a single banner, and we now consume ‘content’. But every time I hear the words ‘content is king’ used today as a newly coined phrase, I shudder. Because it’s 2017.
The content revolution kicked in some time in the last decade, although it was all the way back in 1996 that Bill Gates wrote his groundbreaking essay ‘content is king’. His prediction was this: “Content is where I expect much of the real money will be made on the internet, just as it was in broadcasting.”
The self-made richest man on the planet was pretty much bang on. So was David Bowie.
In 1999, no one could really predict how the internet would alter not only content, but the very nature of how we interact with each other. In a BBC interview at the time, Bowie said on the future of the internet: “It’s an alien life form. Is there life on Mars? Yes, it just landed here … I think we are on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.”
What a refreshing and intelligent article @KellieHolt. Welcome back to Oz!
Excellent article. I agree wholeheartedly. Content is king – but only good content is worthy.
That said, it is so hard to produce good, worthy content and stand out from the crowd when there are so many cheats and shortcutters and fly-by-nights stealing attention away from the genuine content. Just yesterday, I received ‘spam’ from a pool of ‘ghost writers’ offering to write a book for me – a book that I could claim authorship over. Obviously I dismissed it as spam. But, I have actually seen multiple examples of web sites and real people passing themselves off as experts in their field because they are the author of a New York Times best seller. A former colleague of mine did this. And when he offered me a collaboration opportunity, I looked him in the eye over coffee and flat out accused him on plagiarism. And the worst thing about my honest bluntness was, he couldn’t see any harm in it!
…and another thing…a flip-side to the argument…
Great content can also be lost or even killed in a Facebook world. I’ve often published short, to-the-point news items on my web site then shared them to Facebook – only to have idiots ask me a specific question, obviously prompted by the headline or the photo, when the answer is right there in front of them, in the first or second paragraph.
Bowie was right – the Internet is an alien life form – but so are many of the people using it – god bless their cotton socks 😉
Thanks for the article Kellie.
An even bigger thank you for the Bowie clip – which I hadn’t seen before. He predicted the internet as an alien life form, and left us with Blackstar – spooky Mulder.
One quibble, Gates popularised “Content Is King”. It had been around since at least the early ’70s when J.W. Click and Russell N. Baird in their book ‘Magazine Editing and Production’ (1974) highlighted that editors primarily focus on the content of a photo when selecting which to publish, summarising it succinctly with the phrase “Content is king”.
Many decades ago, Howard Gossage said, “People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.”
Update the terminology so it reads, “People engage with what interests them, and sometimes it’s content.”
Nothing has changed.